What Companies Get Wrong About Machine Learning

If you had to pick a tech industry buzzword for 2016, “machine learning” would be a good choice. Every other company, it seems, is packing the phrase into their pitches, and it’s having an effect. According to Carson Sweet of cloud security firm CloudPassage, many companies are asking for machine learning tools to solve problems—even if they don’t have a clear idea of what these tools can do. Speaking at the Structure Security conference on Tuesday in San Francisco, Sweet and executives from two other cyber-security firms explained some common misconceptions about machine learning. One of these is that machine learning is the same thing as “artificial intelligence” (another top candidate for buzzword of the year). As Mark Terenzoni of threat detection firm Sqrrl explained, AI is like building a…